Many modern appliances, consumer devices, and other devices include embedded systems that are configured to perform one or more dedicated functions. However, most embedded systems of such devices do not include networking capabilities, role based access control capabilities, remote interface capabilities, remote control capabilities, or related capabilities. Designing such functionality into an embedded system, designing application programming interfaces (APIs) for accessing such functionality, designing web services capable of communicating with and controlling the embedded system via this added functionality, and designing applications for taking advantage of this functionality can consume considerable resources of the device manufacturer.
Moreover, a consumer is likely to purchase network-connected devices that have been manufactured by multiple different original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). Even if each of these OEMs uses the same internet-of-things (IoT) platform to enable the consumer to interface with his network-connected devices over a network (e.g., the Internet), each OEM will typically provide a different user account for the consumer. Thus a consumer may have multiple different user accounts, each associated with a different device or set of devices, which can make accessing and managing the consumer's devices burdensome.